31/03/2015

If the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court clarified and affirmed that law on Monday, when it ruled on Torrey Dale Grady v. North Carolina, before sending the case back to that state’s high court. The Court’s short but unanimous opinion helps make sense of how the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, interacts with the expanding technological powers of the U.S. government.

28/03/2015

With bots performing all sorts of intellectual property policing these days, fair use considerations are completely off the table. Nuances that can't be handled by a bot should theoretically be turned over to a human being in disputed cases. Unfortunately, dispute processes are often handled in an automated fashion, leading to even more problems.

Nothing was changed at all apart filling the new forced content rating form and suddenly lost all my revenues.

I hope someone human answer with details soon, but I'm joining the anger from all developers around about how #Google treat devs, take 30% share without problem but certainly do not do support or act as human when killing someone.﻿

As previously explained, your promotional images include content that you do not appear to have permission to distribute. For example, images related to films are most likely protected by the various studios that produced and released them. It is reasonable to assume that these would not be made legally available in public domain or via Creative Commons as most studios are extremely protective of their intellectual property. The same could be said of images from various TV series…

This part of Google's response refers to screenshots used in the app's listing. They used to look something like this…

The images used here are only indicative of the app's capabilities. Even if (obviously) unlicensed, the app doesn't promise anything more than control of XBMC content. It doesn't promise access to studios' offerings or otherwise act as a movie/TV show portal. In this context, the movie posters displayed in the screenshots would appear to fall under "fair use." Google's response to Yatse indicates that, even with a human now involved, the Play Store won't tolerate the use of unlicensed images in "promotional" screenshots.

In fact, fair use isn't even discussed. Instead, Google asked Yatse to prove ownership of the disputed artwork before the app could be relisted.

If you are able to prove otherwise, either via direct authorization from a studio representative or the location where you sourced these images (public domain and/or Creative Commons), we could review that information and reconsider the merits of this case.

The motivating factor for this non-consideration is potential litigation, according to the Google Play Team.

Google lost its fight to keep UK residents from filing lawsuits over the Safari browser tracking cookies it placed on their computers even when they explicitly blocked the activity. The Court of Appeal ruling means potentially millions of people can file lawsuits against the company over claims that their privacy has been violated.

A tiny Texas-based broadband provider and a major telecom trade group fired the first shots in what’s expected to be a drawn-out legal war over the Federal Communications Commission’s new net neutrality rules.

Alamo Broadband, which serves about 700 customers south of San Antonio, on Monday asked the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to “hold unlawful, vacate, enjoin, and set aside” the net neutrality order, telling the court that the commission overstepped its authority. USTelecom, which represents industry giants like AT&T and Verizon, took a similar action Monday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

When those companies complained, Google threatened to remove them entirely from the search listings.

The FTC report suggested suing Google for antitrust, but Google made some changes to its practices — importantly, it let companies opt out of letting Google show their content directly in search results — and the FTC commissioners voted to drop the investigation in 2013.

But it's an interesting and rare insight into how Google actually works, versus how you might think it works.

Google's challenge with search

First of all, for all we hear about self-driving cars and Internet balloons and Android and YouTube, search is still Google's most important business today. By far.

In 2014, Google booked $45 billion in advertising revenue from its own sites, out of $66 billion total.

The company won't break out how much of that is first-party ad revenue is Google Search versus other products, but by all accounts it's the vast majority — Google's only other massively popular web site, YouTube, reportedly booked "only" $4 billion last year. This is why the people who work on search and search ads at Google are still considered rock stars at the company, according to many people who work there.

Google actually has a very tough set of technical and business challenges with search. It has to make Google Search as useful as possible, otherwise people will stop using Google and turn to alternatives – not just Microsoft's Bing, which has struggled to gain market share despite being perfectly good on most kinds of searches, but alternatives like Amazon for product search or Yelp for restaurant search. This risk is higher with smartphones, where people are increasingly using apps on their smartphones rather than a search engine in their computer's web browser.

Sometimes, Google has a legitimate case that its own products offer better answers than the web at large — there's no reason to force users to click to another web site to answer a question like "Who's the president of Albania?"

At the same time, Google wants people to use its other products, where it also sells ads.

The end result of this difficult balancing act? In general, Google is taking more and more information that it provides itself and putting it at the top of its search results.

This graphic shows the difference between Google search results in 2008 (left) and 2012 (right).

Tipster

Google has used other tricks over the years, too, like putting Google users' reviews ahead of reviews from third-party sites like TripAdvisor (as long as the person searching was signed in to Google).

BI

A lot of competitors, particularly Yelp, have been complaining about these kinds of tactics for a long time. While US officials have so far stopped short of formally calling Google Search a monopoly or filing formal charges in this area, it now looks like Europe will soon file charges.

Why shouldn't Google do whatever it wants with search?

Is this fair? Do we need really governments to monitor and control Google's search results?

It's sort of like when Microsoft was being investigated by the US Department of Justice for bundling its own web browser, Internet Explorer, with Windows. Steve Ballmer reportedly said during the trial that Microsoft should be allowed to bundle a ham sandwich with Windows — after all, Windows was a Microsoft product, not some kind of public utility.

That was true until the antitrust case went to trial and a judge found in 2000 that Microsoft Windows was a monopoly product, and that Microsoft had used that monopoly power to exclude competitors. The precise legal reasoning is more complicated — antitrust is complicated — but the basic takeaway here is that governments can rule that certain products are so important, and so dominant, that they're no longer exclusively under the control of the company that creates them.

The Microsoft case eventually went through appeals and the company suffered fewer restrictions than the first judge, Thomas Jackson, originally imposed. But his "findings of fact" were really important: They paved the way for dozens of antitrust lawsuits by US state attorneys general and private companies like Sun, RealNetworks, and IBM. Microsoft had to pay billions in settlements before the fallout receded.

This is what Google desperately wants to avoid. If a government body issues a formal legal ruling that Google Search is an anticompetitive monopoly that needs to be regulated, it opens the floodgates.

Just remember what Google is

Regardless of whether Google faces new charges, the thing to keep in mind is that Google is a for-profit company. Its products have to be good, otherwise nobody will use them. But they also serve the larger business goals of the company.

Android isn't just a mobile operating system that Google decided to give away to anybody who wanted to use it. It's also a way for Google to make sure that nobody else dominates mobile browsing, where they might be tempted to guide people away from Google's search engine and ads.

Chrome isn't just an attempt to build a faster, better web browser. It also gives you lots of ways to search Google, plus offers many subtle encouragements to stay signed into Google services at all time (if you want those personalized bookmarks on top of your Chrome browser, you need to be signed in), which in turn helps Google target search results and ads just for you.

Every Google product should be viewed through this lens. Last week's revelations make this clearer than ever.

In testing Sirius, Mars has already shown if you run the service on traditional hardware, it requires about 168 times more machines, space, and power than a text-based search engine a la Google Search. When you consider that voice-recognition is the future of not only mobile phones but the ever growing array of wearable devices, from Apple Watch on down, that’s completely impractical. “We’re going to hit a wall,” Mars says. Data centers don’t just take up space. They don’t just cost enormous amounts of money to build. They burn enormous amounts of energy—and that costs even more money.

The big question is: What hardware will replace the traditional gear? It’s a question that will affect not only the Apples and the Googles and the Microsofts and so many other app makers, but also the companies that sell data center hardware, most notably big-name chip makers like Intel and AMD. “We’re all over this,” says Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer. “It’s huge for us and our future.”